FORT WORTH, Texas — Pat Pelletier was surprisingly unemotional about the recent Supreme Court arguments in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that abortion supporters and opponents alike believe might reverse the seminal 1973 decision that legalized on-demand abortion in the U.S.
“It’s not in my imagination to see a world without” the Roe v. Wade ruling, said Pelletier, the president of Mother and Unborn Baby Care, or MUBC. She founded the Fort Worth crisis pregnancy center with her late husband, Chuck, 37 years ago.
While a world without Roe is far from a certainty, the tone and line of questioning from a majority of the justices in the Dobbs case has given people such as Pelletier — whose center has saved more than 9,000 babies by offering women support and care as alternatives to abortion — renewed hope that meaningful change may be on the horizon.
The court will determine whether a 2018 Mississippi law that prohibits most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy can take effect.
The law has been stymied by lower court rulings — based on Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed it decades later. States have been barred from placing limits on abortion prior to “fetal viability,” a rather capricious standard currently recognized to occur around 24 weeks of gestation.
But this month, the court’s six-justice conservative majority seemed poised to uphold the law. In a nation where close to 1 million legal abortions still occur every year, the significance of such a shift could not be overstated.
But even Pelletier’s enthusiasm is tempered by the reality that the collapse of Roe would not mean an end to abortion in America.
“When it does happen,” she told me, “it’s going to be 50 fights instead of one.”
If the court upholds Mississippi’s law, it would most likely be because the majority believes — as it signaled this month — that abortion policy should be left to the democratic process.
Indeed, the fight would go to state legislatures. No rest for the weary.
“But these are winnable fights,” Pelletier said, pointing to developments in medical technology that are making it harder for people to deny personhood, even in the earliest stages of life.
“For the children growing up [after Roe falls], abortion won’t be a reality to them,” she continued. Pelletier predicted that over time, states where abortion is not permitted will raise generations of children who cannot even imagine that such an atrocity was allowed to occur with impunity for so long.
For now, though, the horror of abortion and the cause of women who feel it is their only choice, are very real for Pelletier.
Most women who enter her center come seeking to terminate their pregnancies.
At least that was the case before Texas’ new heartbeat law, which relies on private citizens to enforce a ban on abortion procedures once a fetal heartbeat is detected, took effect.
The downside to that law, she says, is that it has reduced the number of women coming in because they incorrectly believe her center offers abortions.
But the law also means that women in crisis pregnancies must seek out real help for the problems that underlay their desire to terminate their pregnancies.
“They are learning that there are so many options available,” she said. “A baby isn’t a crisis.”
That doesn’t mean an unplanned pregnancy isn’t hard. Pelletier knows this; it’s why she does what she does.
Her center maintains relationships with mothers for as long as they need help. She says that some come back for assistance even after as long as 15 years.
And MUBC continues to help.
“We promised that to them,” she said.
If Roe is overturned, Pelletier’s work will increase, but it won’t change. More women and babies will need her help, and she will be ready for it.
{p class=”krtText”}Perhaps that’s why the recent arguments didn’t affect her as she expected.
“Our work is the fight to save one single baby at a time,” she told me, “thereby changing the entire universe for all of eternity.”
(Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.)
